I am going to a big conference next week, 2 full days out of the office. In times of yore, I would haul my trusty Macbook along and lugging it with me on both days as I move from pavilion to briefing hall, from lunch back to pavilion and from beer hall to bed. A [...]

Somebody needs to create a system that encompasses continuous data protection, deduplication and cloud storage.  Many vendors have various parts of such a solution but none to my knowledge has put it all together. Why CDP, deduplication and cloud storage? We have written about cloud problems in the past (eventual data consistency and what’s holding back [...]

I have been struggling for sometime now to understand why cloud computing and cloud storage have suddenly become so popular.  We have previously discussed some of cloud problems (here and here) but we have never touched on why cloud has become so popular. In my view, SaaS or ASPs and MSPs have been around for [...]

Chuck Hollis from EMC wrote a post last week on Storage is software about how hardware parts are becoming commoditized and so highly functional that future storage differentiation will only come from software.  I commented that hardware differentiation is also becoming much easier with FPGAs and their ilk.  Chuck replied that yes this may be so [...]

Last year at VMworld, VMware was saying that 2010 was year for VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), last week NetApp said that most large NY banks they talked with were looking at implementing VDI and prior to that, HP StorageWorks announced a new VDI reference platform that could support ~1600 VDI images.  It seems that VDI [...]

At NetApp’s Analyst Days last week David Robbins, CTO Information Technology, reported on a new highly efficient Global Dynamic Lab (GDL) data center which they built in Raleigh, North Carolina.  NetApp predicts this new data center  will have a power use effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.2.  Most data centers today do well if they can [...]

Starting thinking today that the iPad with some modifications  could be used to provide universal computing and information services to the world’s poor as a One iPad per Child (OipC).  Such a solution could easily replace the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) that exists today with a more commercially viable product. From my perspective only [...]

Deduplication is a mechanism to reduce the amount of data stored on disk for backup, archive or even primary storage.  For any storage, data is often duplicated and any system that eliminates storing duplicate data will be more utilize storage more efficiently. Essentially, deduplication systems identify duplicate data and only store one copy of such [...]